Preface

The first thesis presented in this book is that the Mahsa Movement is most probably the first genuine, global, and extensive feminist movement in Iran ever, and perhaps in the Muslim world. This is not to deny that women have played a significant role in social movements in Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iran, and other Muslim countries since the nineteenth century. But within these movements, women were not in the vanguard, did not become the main actors, did not express their feminist demands in clear antagonism towards the powers that be, and men did not follow them en masse.

In the Mahsa Movement young women played a pioneering role not only in launching the movement, but also in their participation throughout. The protests quickly spread among young men, who showed that they largely shared the women’s views on the veil, on equal gender rights, and the rejection of theocratic rule. The movement was, in a sense, the apogee of what had begun the day after the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran with the imposition of the veil and, subsequently, the application of Sharia law, which spelled out the structural inferiority of women in terms of rights. But the movement also represents a break with prevailing trends in Iranian feminism, notably in terms of the explicit and direct rejection of the veil and the Islamic Regime, as well as in the affirmation of a new culture based on the joy of living and the unvarnished, uninhibited secularization expressed throughout the movement without any reference to religion.

What essentially characterizes a global feminist movement is the primordial role played by women, where the major slogans and demands refer explicitly to women. In the Mahsa Movement, these conditions are certainly met: the slogan “Woman, life, freedom” sets the tone, the role of women at the vanguard is undeniable, and in addition, young men participated actively in it. When in March–April 2023 the movement lost its ability to mobilize groups, individual women continued in the struggle, by rejecting the compulsory veil.

While women were the trailblazers in the protest movement, young Iranian men conscientiously played an ancillary role by putting into question their masculine pride founded on patriarchal, traditional Islam – their male “Islamic honor” so-called (gheyrat in Persian, gheyra in Arabic). The distinctive feature of the Mahsa Movement was not only that young women rebelled against their subaltern role – in many movements throughout the Muslim world women have revolted time and again in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries against their inferior condition – but that the young men joined them without ulterior motive, recognizing their legitimacy and their role as foremost denouncers of the Islamic patriarchy and theocracy.

The Mahsa Movement has two essential characteristics: the quest for gender equality and the denunciation of dictatorship. This book seeks to analyze the mindset of the young men but also, and especially, of the young women within the movement and their conflictual relationship with a patriarchal state that denies them equality and the freedom to own their bodies. The movement began mid-September 2022, called here the Mahsa Movement after the first name of the young Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, killed by the Vice Squad in Tehran on September 16, 2022. In cooperation with young men, women challenged the Theocratic Regime for several months.

The second purpose of this book is to depict the political and ideological features of the Islamic State that has ruled the country since 1979 and its distorted relationship to society. I call it a “soft” totalitarian regime: it stifles social protest but is unable to prevent its rise. This book describes the multiple forms of the State’s repression through its central organization, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), through the clergy, and through the repressive organizations under their aegis (official and unofficial prisons, militia, the Basij Resistance Force, etc.). Arbitrary arrests according to the formal Iranian Constitution, torture, sequestration, and execution are the arsenal of this state, which acts promptly to stop non-violent protest movements. It survives because it crushes unorganized, leaderless protesters; it prevents their organization and progress by ruthless repression, breaking them through extreme violence.

The book focuses on the emergence of new social activists. First are the women themselves, whose forebears – often leading feminist intellectuals – have raised the awareness of the younger generations, and paid a heavy price through imprisonment and systematic mistreatment, even psychological and physical torture. They have provided the new generations with a body of feminist literature and social movements (for instance, the Campaign for One Million Signatures in 2006) that have left their imprint on the young women who are risking their lives to demonstrate in the streets of Iran.

Meanwhile a new type of intellectual has emerged, comprising hip-hop, rap, and blues singers, who have become the “organic intellectuals” of the latest protest movement. The book points also to the influence of the diaspora, through TV channels and the internet, in shaping the culture of Iranian youth. The latter reject the Theocratic State and its repression and total disregard for their aspirations.

The book also underlines the secular culture of the new generations, which I call “joie de vivre” (zest for earthly life). It is centered on this world’s pleasure and daily life, and not on a sacrificial afterlife in the name of martyrdom which underpins the ideology of the Islamic Republic. In this new culture, free and secular relations between men and women, the desire to enjoy life in this world and not in the hereafter, as well as the rejection of the “mournful culture” of the Islamic Regime, are emphasized. The culture of joy is expressed in opposition to the Theocratic Regime’s ideology in a festive but also transgressive way, of which dancing, partying, and the ostentatious female unveiling in public are prominent aspects.

In the protest movements that have unfolded in Iran since 2009, the middle classes have played a decisive role. But they have been undermined by the decline in their living standards. The Islamic Regime has debilitated them through its economic policies, and not least the general crisis of the Iranian economy has taken its toll due to its exclusion from the world economy in consequence of the country’s nuclear program. A large part of the population could be said to be middle class in terms of culture due to the overall increase in the level of education, but it does not have the economic status corresponding to its expectations as aspiring middle-class members. I call them “would-be middle classes.” In this group, their adverse economic status in conjunction with their secular culture pits them directly against the Islamic State, which disapproves of meritocracy and is driven by cronyism, deep-rooted corruption, and prohibitions on bodily freedom and gender mixing in the name of orthodox Islam. Its clash with the young would-be middle classes is head-on.

The would-be middle classes have a half-imaginary, half-real construction of a global, worldwide civil sphere. They take it as witness to the legitimacy of their struggle for freedom and the illegitimacy of a state that denies them the most elementary freedoms. The protagonists in the fight against women’s inequality are recognized and awarded for the defense of freedom by the international institutions that represent the global civil sphere. Reference to the wider world is one of the hallmarks of the Mahsa Movement.

This book aims to show the vigor of secularization in Iran despite the Islamic State’s unrelenting endeavors to turn its citizens into submissive Muslims through its state apparatus (national education, the official TV and radio networks, the propaganda machine sustained by the government). Secularization has occurred against a rigid form of Shi’ism that I term theocratic Shi’ism, which is the ideological cornerstone of the Islamic Republic. It shows major differences with traditional Shi’ism. Theocratic Shi’ism places special emphasis on martyrdom and mourning in the service of a theocratic state and its purpose is to legitimize the domination of society by the Velayat faqih (the absolute rule of the Supreme Leader). It justifies the constraints imposed by the government: the compulsory veil, segregation of men and women, prohibition of alcohol consumption, respect for Ramadan fasting, prohibition of celebration and dancing in public, opposition to the West in the name of a politico-religious conception imposed on society and not open to debate, and so on. In most cases, what was flexible in traditional Shi’ism has become rigid and unyielding under theocratic Shi’ism.

The Islamic Republic has failed to de-secularize society and this book seeks to explain why. The widespread protest movements since 2009 are analyzed in this respect. The Mahsa Movement of 2022–3 has shaken the Islamic Regime but has failed to overthrow it. It has succeeded, culturally and socially, in showing the Regime’s illegitimacy, and women continue to reject the mandatory veil by appearing unveiled in public. The book underlines the recurrence of the protest movements, despite the harshness of the repression, leading to the wearing down of the Theocratic State.

This book highlights the continued action of...